The Web’s 5 Most Endangered Words
Dave Pell, on how how ‘Let me think about that’ is in danger of becoming extinct on the web:
That’s an apt description of the new national pastime: Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and making determinations and judgments without a full set of facts.
When confronted with the realtime web’s constant flow of incoming information, who has time for a full set of facts? We each take a few seconds to consider a one hundred forty character blurb and then hammer out our reactions by way of a Tweet or status update.
Example: some readers will see this link, skip on over to it, get the gist of what it’s talking about, and then regurgitate it in Hootsuite so they can seem clever. It’s almost reflexive.
How do I know this?
Because I’ve done it before myself many times. And before long, you realize that all this information consumption has given you knowledge that’s an ocean wide, but a only a puddle deep.
The compulsions of an infovore dictate that we must process, form judgments on and share inbound information quickly. This is a demand of the attention economy as well as the realtime nature of the tools web workers use. And it’s sad, because adult issues aren’t always cute sound bites and often need extensive research to understand and editorialize.
Want to form a real opinion on global warming that’s deeper than the quips fired back and forth between opposing sides, complete with excerpts from cherrypicked studies that perfectly back their viewpoints? Get ready to read reams of science and climatology papers. Hope you’ve got some serious chops, too, because a lot of this data coming out of MIT and Harvard and NOAA isn’t exactly beach reading.
Of course, the corollary phenomenon to all this is how longform is dead and short is everything: short blog posts, short vignettes, tweets and Facebook updates. When’s the last time you read a long or challenging book? It’s been a while for me, and now I’ve decided to force myself to read real books – the kind that require long spans of attention – just to get back to what I used to be able to do with ease. (Infinite Jest, I’m coming for you.)
If you’re a web worker and have to process a lot of information daily to work social channels for yourself or your business, has this trend affected you? How so?
###
MIPRO Consulting is a nationally-recognized consulting firm specializing in PeopleSoft Enterprise (particularly Enterprise Asset Management), Workday and Business Intelligence. You’re reading MIPRO Unfiltered, its blog. If you’d like to contact MIPRO, email is a great place to start, or you can easily jump over to its main website. If you’d like to see what MIPRO offers via Twitter or Facebook, we’d love to have you.
More nerdery posts.
